By Joe BudzienskiA recent survey has found that half of UK job seekers use social media to find a job(1), and recruiters who used social media found a 44% improvement in candidate quality(2). In addition, Twitter's UK user base has now grown to 15m users(3).

By Duncan Melville, Chief Economist at Inclusion"The increase in employment in the quarter (248,000) reported by the ONS today is unexpectedly strong. But, the quarterly fall in unemployment (76,000) was lower than that seen in recent months. The smaller fall in unemployment means there has been a large fall in economic inactivity (104,000).

However, new data shows an unwelcome rise in the number of people on sickness benefits (ESA and IB). There are now around 90,000 more on these benefits than there had been 18 months previously, in August 2013."

By Mervyn DinnenRecent research into social recruiting by Adecco Group found increasing numbers of job seekers using social networking sites as part of their search.

Twitter has over 270 million active users sending in excess of 500 million tweets every day, 78% of them from mobile, it seems natural that this real time conversation platform should be somewhere that job seekers feel they can accelerate, or refine, their search. Our own research, shows that 34% engage with companies through social media, with 24% likely to form a negative opinion of a company with no social profile.